The Coalition Against NATO/G8 War & Poverty Agenda has nothing on its website about using nonviolence, supporting nonviolence, or opposing violence.
The G8 and NATO Protest also has nothing like that, but does have this:
"As we plan our actions and tactics, we will take care to maintain appropriate separations of time and space between divergent tactics."
A month ago I blogged that I would not endorse Occupy the RNC or DNC because both groups were refusing to state that they opposed violence.
Occupy the RNC has now put this on its website:
"We are not organizing actions, especially violent ones. That would just be stupid. We exist to provide information and facilitate logistics for people resisting the RNC."
Not how I would have put it. Nor would I have added:
"Don't f*ck with us. We'll sue you."
But foreswearing violence and calling it stupid is enough for me. I wish Occupy DNC could bring itself to do as much. Better yet, just add "We oppose violence and will not use it."
That would be ideal, smart, strategic, and beneficial to the movement.
When the cops start a riot in Chicago on May 20th, raise your hand if you think CNN will base its coverage on your Youtube of what really happened and ignore that statement above about "space between divergent tactics."
Back in November, some good activists working with Occupy Wall Street wrote:
Diversity of tactics' becomes an easy way to avoid wrestling with questions of strategy and accountability. It lets us off the hook from doing the hard work of debating our positions and coming to agreements about how we want to act together. It becomes a code for "anything goes,' and makes it impossible for our movements to hold anyone accountable for their actions."
In other words, it's not consensus. It's minority rule. Most of us favor an openly nonviolent movement, publicly commited to nonviolence. When I question organizers of these protests, they practically scream that that is indeed what they favor, but that they want to be inclusive and not allow the 1% to divide us. Is destroying us better than dividing us? Is scaring away the majority of the 99% a price worth paying to be inclusive of 10 people who want to smash windows and 2 guys who want to smash police officers? What about the openness lost by embracing tactics that require secrecy?
"The Occupy movement includes people from a broad diversity of backgrounds, life experiences and political philosophies. Some of us want to reform the system and some of us want to tear it down and replace it with something better. Our one great point of agreement is our call for transparency and accountability. We stand against the corrupt institutions that broker power behind closed doors. We call to account the financial manipulators that have bilked billions out of the poor and the middle classes.
"Just as we call for accountability and transparency, we ourselves must be accountable and transparent. Some tactics are incompatible with those goals, even if in other situations they might be useful, honorable or appropriate. We can't be transparent behind masks. We can't be accountable for actions we run away from. We can't maintain the security culture necessary for planning and carrying out attacks on property and also maintain the openness that can continue to invite in a true diversity of new people. We can't make alliances with groups from impacted communities, such as immigrants, if we can't make agreements about what tactics we will employ in any given action.
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